Poetry by Aditi Machado

Excerpts from “Rhapsody”

Let us exercise our vocal chords.
Let us draw them out
limbs.
Let us say there is always a longer or a shorter
dress, always congruities, blissful, bitter
rhythms, sprung onions splitting, violins
in harmony that is harmonic, chaos that is chaotic,
in sense that is sensible, in here it inheres, out there
rapid rabbits. Let us labor under these notions
as under the cantus planus factory whine.
Let us stumble around, humming, stumbling, humming.
Then something in the shape of leaves,
something in the touching of ‘red.’
Is it subversive?
Let us hesitate with ‘red.’ Let’s feel it out
with the feeling which we are. It is a panic
in the full field. This outward loping, is it
making it? Is it filling it? Is it making it
explicit?
Let us make it lovely again. Let us make gardens and lakes
a variorum of some eternal para-
nomasiac, some perfect para-
dogmatic, perfect para-
dise.
Let us stumble around
this place that’s humming,
humming. Counting
the stems and the
howling, hollering,
the refrains, o
the terrible refrains.
We’re in a musical, thinking.

Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017) and the translator of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action Books, 2016).